Cristina Fernández on 9 December 2015. Her arrest warrant is based on a 2015 investigation by prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who died in mysterious circumstances.
Photograph: Ricardo Mazalan/AP

A judge in Argentina has accused the former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of treason and called on the country’s senate to permit her arrest and trial for allegedly covering up Iranian involvement in a 1994 bomb attack on a Jewish center in Buenos Aires.

Alberto Nisman: testimony of ex-spy chief swings case towards murder

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Judge Claudio Bonadio accused Fernández on Thursday of seeking to negotiate a secret deal to obtain trade concessions with Iran in return for camouflaging Tehran’s role in the attack on the AMIA Jewish centre that killed 85 people and left hundreds wounded.

At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Fernández denied the charges, saying: “There’s no crime, there’s no case. Bonadío knows it. The government knows it. President [Mauricio] Macri also knows it.”

The Argentinian government made no official comment on the case, though various press reports cited government sources as saying Macri would not press for a congressional vote to remove the former president’s immunity.

Bonadio asked lawmakers to remove Fernández’s legal immunity – which she gained when she was sworn in as a senator last week – and ordered the arrest of several close allies of the former president.

Fernández’s former legal secretary Carlos Zannini, the social activist Luis D’Elía –accused of being the middleman between the former president and Iran – and the Muslim cleric Jorge Alejandro Khalil were all arrested in raids on Thursday morning. The former foreign minister Héctor Timerman was held under house arrest due to health issues.

“Free all the political prisoners,” D’Elía yelled as he was handcuffed outside his home in the suburb of Isidro Casanova shortly before 7am on Thursday morning. “This is a political case, they want to humiliate the opposition.”

Nisman was found lying in a pool of blood on his bathroom floor on 18 January 2015, soon after accusing Fernández and Timerman of “being authors and accomplices of an aggravated cover-up and obstruction of justice regarding the Iranians accused of the AMIA terrorist attack”.

Nisman’s accusations were based on phone taps on close allies of Fernández, who he said conspired in a plot to negotiate an “oil for grain” trade deal if Argentina dropped international Interpol arrest warrants against senior Iranian officials accused of planning the bombing.

Initial police reports and autopsies found no sign anyone else had been present when Nisman died, and federal police said the prosecutor shot himself.

Spies, cover-ups and the mysterious death of an Argentinian prosecutor

Fernández has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing or involvement in a cover-up, and described the case against her as a legal vendetta.

The former president faces potential jail sentences in several other cases involving alleged corruption during her term of office, but currently enjoys congressional immunity from prosecution.

Two-thirds of the senate would have to vote in favour of lifting her immunity to comply with the judge’s arrest order.

The Peronist senate bloc – to which Fernández belongs – holds 32 seats, although only about a dozen senators are in her camp. President Mauricio Macri’s centre-right Cambiemos alliance, meanwhile, holds 25 seats.

The charge of treason carries a potential prison sentence of up to 15 years.

The arrest warrant against Fernández was seen by her supporters as the latest move in a politically motivated campaign against the former president and her allies, a number of whom are now in jail pending corruption trials started since Macri assumed the presidency, nearly two years ago.

On Twitter, #StopThePersecution (#BastaDePerseguir) became the top-trending hashtag in Argentina. The labour leader Juan Grabois, who has close ties with Pope Francis,called for a protest march against “the policy of repression and the persecution of opponents driven by the national government”.